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Sell in May and go away? What about "risk off?" And ever more QE?
Today's letter is a quick note and a reprise of a popular letter
from yesteryear (with a bit of new slant), as I am at my
conference in Carlsbad.

But first, I thought I would shoot you a few quick, interesting
notes that crossed my desk in the last week. It is almost a
ritual for me to mention at this time of year the old investment
saw, "Sell in May and go away." It has been surprisingly good
advice in most years. My good friend Art
Cashin is a curator (and prodigious progenitor) of investment
wisdom. He offers these two insights from his research:

Tomorrow is the beginning of May, so a "Sell in May" review is in
order. To avoid reinventing the wheel, let me plagiarize the
veteran Jim Brown's synopsis yesterday.

Sell in May? We are at that time of year when investors have to
decide if they want to take profits and move to cash for the
summer or risk losing those profits in the next correction. The
Stock Trader's Almanac has made the "Sell in May and go away"
trade one of the most visible trends in the market. Because the
markets normally decline in the summer, they came up with the
best six-month trading system. If you had invested $10,000 in the
Dow in 1950 and only kept the money in stocks from November
through April, you would have had $684,073 as of the end of 2011.
If you reversed the strategy and invested for the May-October
period, you would have lost $1,024 over the same 61-year period.
That is a pretty telling statistic, and the cycle rarely fails to
produce.

And Art followed up the next day with:

Mark Hulbert suggests it may be a much older multi-national
phenomenon. The "sell in May" pattern also exists in other
countries besides the US. Ben Jacobsen, a finance professor at
Massey University in New Zealand, reached that conclusion after
studying all available historical evidence from each of 108
separate stock markets around the world. For example, his
statistical tests detected the seasonal pattern in the United
Kingdom stock market as far back as 1694.

Jacobsen, in an interview, emphasized that the Halloween
Indicator isn't merely the product of a shameless, after-the-fact
data-mining exercise. He said that he found an article as long
ago as 1935 – in the Financial Times – in which the
"sell in May" pattern is referred to as something that was
already well-known and followed.

Even though the pattern nearly 80 years ago already had a solid
historical foundation, Jacobsen notes, since then the difference
between the average returns in winter and summer has become even
bigger.

This is a crucial point, he argues, since the all-too-usual
tendency is for patterns to begin to evaporate once investors
become aware of them and try to exploit them."

China's PMI came in
this week at barely above 50 and has been clearly falling for the
last year. Despite what you read, China's economic growth is
slowing, which is NOT good for commodity metals and products
(different from the "softs" like grains, cattle, etc.). GaveKal
argues that the commodity price fall that we have been seeing of
late is possibly structural in nature. Yet the bond market rises,
gold is rising, stocks are rising. (Clearly, the market did not
listen to my friend Nouriel
Roubini this morning – Dr. Doom indeed! After his speech, no
one at this conference can call me pessimistic. Although he
prefers the term realistic.) Seemingly everything is
levitating.

"Where is risk off?" I ask aloud back in the green room as I
write this.

Paul McCulley quips to me, "Never get in a …… contest with a man
who buys ink by the barrel." The clear implication is that this
levitation is all central bank-induced. The Fed, Japan, and the
ECB are all in full gear, and England is only waiting for
Mark
Carney to arrive from Canada with the North American printing
technology employed so well by his friend Ben
Bernanke.

The question I am asking at the conference is, "What will happen
when quantitative easing has to end? What does that look like?" I
will report next week on what I am learning here, but right now
let's return to what has proven to be the most popular piece I
have written over the last 13 years. And as you read it, think
not just of sand piles but of the analogous pile of electrons of
quantitative easing as it mounts up toward criticality.

Friedrich Nietzsche knew just how the troubling unknown grips our
imaginations and compels us to look for answers:

"To trace something unknown back to something known is
alleviating, soothing, gratifying, and gives moreover a feeling
of power. Danger, disquiet, anxiety attend the unknown –
the first instinct is to eliminate these distressing
states. First principle: any explanation is better than
none…. The cause-creating drive is thus conditioned and excited
by the feeling of fear…." –Friedrich Nietzsche

"Any explanation is better than none." And the simpler, it seems
in the investment game, the better. "The markets went up because
oil went down," we are told. Then the next day the opposite
relationship occurs. Then there is another reason for the
movement of the markets. But we all intuitively know that things
are far more complicated than that. As Nietzsche notes, dealing
with the unknown can be disturbing, so we look for the simple
explanation.

"Ah," we tell ourselves, "I know why that happened." With an
explanation firmly in hand, we now feel we know something. And
the behavioral psychologists note that this state actually
releases chemicals in our brain that make us feel good. We
literally become addicted to the simple explanation. The fact
that what we "know" (the explanation for the unknowable) is
irrelevant or even wrong is not important to the chemical
release. And so we look for reasons.

That is why some people get so angry when you challenge their
beliefs. You are literally taking away the source of their good
feeling, like drugs from a junkie or a boyfriend from a teenage
girl.

Thus we may reason that the NASDAQ bubble happened because of
Greenspan. Or was a collective mania. Or was due to any number of
things – pick your favorite belief. My favorite: just as the
proverbial butterfly flapping its wings in the Amazon
triggers a storm in Europe, maybe a borrower in Las Vegas
triggered the subprime crash.

Crazy? Maybe not. Today we will look at what complexity theory
tells us about the reasons for earthquakes, disasters, and the
movements of markets. Then we'll look at how New Zealand, Fed
policy, gold, oil, and an investor in St. Louis can all be tied
together in a critical state. Of course, how critical
and what state are the questions here.

Ubiquity, Complexity
Theory, and Sandpiles

We are going to start our explorations with excerpts from a very
important book by Mark Buchanan, called Ubiquity: Why Catastrophes Happen. I HIGHLY
recommend it to those of you who, like me, are trying to
understand the complexity of the markets. Not directly about
investing, although he touches on it, it is about chaos theory,
complexity theory and critical states. It is written in a manner
any layman can understand. There are no equations, just easy to
grasp, well-written stories and analogies.

As kids, we all had the fun of going to the beach and
playing in the sand. Remember taking your plastic buckets and
making sand piles? Slowly pouring the sand into an ever bigger
pile, until one side of the pile started an avalanche?

Imagine, Buchanan says, dropping one grain of sand after another
onto a table. A pile soon develops. Eventually, just one grain
starts an avalanche. Most of the time it is a small one, but
sometimes it builds on itself and it seems like one whole side of
the pile slides down to the bottom.

Well, in 1987 three physicists, named Per Bak, Chao Tang, and
Kurt Weisenfeld began to play the sandpile game in their lab at
Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York. Now, actually piling
up one grain of sand at a time is a slow process, so they wrote a
computer program to do it. Not as much fun, but a whole lot
faster. Not that they really cared about sandpiles. They were
more interested in what are called nonequilibrium systems.

They learned some interesting things. What is the typical size of
an avalanche? After a huge number of tests with millions of
grains of sand, they found that there is no typical number. "Some
involved a single grain; others, ten, a hundred or a thousand.
Still others were pile-wide cataclysms involving millions that
brought nearly the whole mountain down. At any time, literally
anything, it seemed, might be just about to occur."

The piles were indeed completely chaotic in their
unpredictability. Now, let's read this next paragraph from
Buchanan slowly. It is important, as it creates a mental image
that may help us understand the organization of the financial
markets and the world economy. (emphasis mine)

"To find out why [such unpredictability] should show up in their
sandpile game, Bak and colleagues next played a trick with their
computer. Imagine peering down on the pile from above, and
coloring it in according to its steepness. Where it is
relatively flat and stable, color it green; where steep and, in
avalanche terms, 'ready to go,' color it red. What do you
see? They found that at the outset the pile looked mostly
green, but that, as the pile grew, the green became infiltrated
with ever more red. With more grains, the scattering of red
danger spots grew until a dense skeleton of instability ran
through the pile. Here then was a clue to its
peculiar behavior: a grain falling on a red spot can, by
domino-like action, cause sliding at other nearby red
spots. If the red network was sparse, and all
trouble spots were well isolated one from the other, then a
single grain could have only limited repercussions. But when the
red spots come to riddle the pile, the consequences of the next
grain become fiendishly unpredictable. It might trigger
only a few tumblings, or it might instead set off a cataclysmic
chain reaction involving millions. The sandpile seemed to
have configured itself into a hypersensitive and peculiarly
unstable condition in which the next falling grain could trigger
a response of any size whatsoever."

The Critical
State

Something only a math nerd could love? Scientists refer to this
as a critical state. The term critical state can mean the point
at which water would go to ice or steam, or the moment that
critical mass induces a nuclear reaction, etc. It is the point at
which something triggers a change in the basic nature or
character of the object or group. Thus, (and very casually for
all you physicists) we refer to something being in a critical
state (or use the term critical mass) when there is the
opportunity for significant change.

"But to physicists, [the critical state] has always been seen as
a kind of theoretical freak and sideshow, a devilishly unstable
and unusual condition that arises only under the most exceptional
circumstances [in highly controlled experiments]… In the sandpile
game, however, a critical state seemed to arise naturally through
the mindless sprinkling of grains."

Thus, they asked themselves, could this phenomenon show up
elsewhere? In the earth's crust triggering earthquakes, or as
wholesale changes in an ecosystem – or as a stock market crash?
"Could the special organization of the critical state explain why
the world at large seems so susceptible to unpredictable
upheavals?" Could it help us understand not just earthquakes, but
why cartoons in a third rate paper in Denmark could cause
world-wide riots?

Buchanan concludes in his opening chapter: "There are many
subtleties and twists in the story … but the basic message,
roughly speaking, is simple: The peculiar and exceptionally
unstable organization of the critical state does indeed seem to
be ubiquitous in our world. Researchers in the past few
years have found its mathematical fingerprints in the workings of
all the upheavals I've mentioned so far [earthquakes,
eco-disasters, market crashes], as well as in the spreading of
epidemics, the flaring of traffic jams, the patterns by which
instructions trickle down from managers to workers in the office,
and in many other things. At the heart of our story, then,
lies the discovery that networks of things of all kinds – atoms,
molecules, species, people, and even ideas – have a marked
tendency to organize themselves along similar lines. On the
basis of this insight, scientists are finally beginning to fathom
what lies behind tumultuous events of all sorts, and to see
patterns at work where they have never seen them before."

Now, let's think about this for a moment. Going back to the
sandpile game, you find that as you double the number of grains
of sand involved in an avalanche, the probability of an avalanche
becomes 2.14 times more likely. We find something similar in
earthquakes. In terms of energy, the data indicate that
earthquakes become four times less likely each time you double
the energy they release. Mathematicians refer to this as a "power
law," a special mathematical pattern that stands out in contrast
to the overall complexity of the earthquake process.

Fingers of
Instability

So what happens in our game? "…after the pile evolves into a
critical state, many grains rest just on the verge of tumbling,
and these grains link up into 'fingers of instability' of all
possible lengths. While many are short, others slice through the
pile from one end to the other. So the chain reaction triggered
by a single grain might lead to an avalanche of any size
whatsoever, depending on whether that grain fell on a short,
intermediate or long finger of instability."

Now, we come to a critical point in our discussion of the
critical state. Again, read this with the markets in mind (again,
emphasis mine):

"In this simplified setting of the sandpile, the power law also
points to something else: the surprising conclusion that even the
greatest of events have no special or exceptional causes.
After all, every avalanche large or small starts out the
same way, when a single grain falls and makes the pile just
slightly too steep at one point. What makes one
avalanche much larger than another has nothing to do with its
original cause, and nothing to do with some special situation in
the pile just before it starts. Rather, it has to
do with the perpetually unstable organization of the critical
state, which makes it always possible for the next grain to
trigger an avalanche of any size."

Now, let's couple this idea with a few other concepts. First,
Hyman Minsky (who should have been a Nobel laureate) points out
that stability leads to instability. The more comfortable we get
with a given condition or trend, the longer it will persist and
then when the trend fails, the more dramatic the correction. The
problem with long term macroeconomic stability is that it tends
to produce unstable financial arrangements. If we believe that
tomorrow and next year will be the same as last week and last
year, we are more willing to add debt or postpone savings in
favor of current consumption. Thus, says Minsky, the longer the
period of stability, the higher the potential risk for even
greater instability when market participants must change their
behavior.

Relating this to our sandpile, the longer that a critical state
builds up in an economy, or in other words, the more "fingers of
instability" that are allowed to develop a connection to other
fingers of instability, the greater the potential for a serious
"avalanche."

We Are Managing
Uncertainty

Or, maybe a series of smaller shocks lessens the long reach of
the fingers of instability, giving a paradoxical rise to even
more apparent stability. As the late Hunt Taylor wrote:

"Let us start with what we know. First, these markets look
nothing like anything I've ever encountered before. Their
stunning complexity, the staggering number of tradable
instruments and their interconnectedness, the light-speed at
which information moves, the degree to which the movement of one
instrument triggers nonlinear reactions along chains of related
derivatives, and the requisite level of mathematics necessary to
price them speak to the reality that we are now sailing in
uncharted waters….

"I've had 30-plus years of learning experiences in markets, all
of which tell me that technology and telecommunications will not
do away with human greed and ignorance. I think we will drive the
car faster and faster until something bad happens. And I think it
will come, like a comet, from that part of the night sky where we
least expect it. This is something old.

"I think shocks will come, but they will be shallower, shorter.
They will be harder to predict, because we are not really
managing risk anymore. We are managing
uncertainty – too many new variables, plus leverage on a
scale we have never encountered (something borrowed). And, when
the inevitable occurs, the buying opportunities that result will
be won by the technologically enabled swift."

Another way to think about it is the way Didier Sornette, a
French geophysicist, has described financial crashes in his
wonderful book Why Stock Markets Crash (the math,
though, was far beyond me!). He wrote, "[T]he specific
manner by which prices collapsed is not the most important
problem: a crash occurs because the market has entered an
unstable phase and any small disturbance or process may have
triggered the instability. Think of a ruler held up vertically on
your finger: this very unstable position will lead eventually to
its collapse, as a result of a small (or an absence of adequate)
motion of your hand or due to any tiny whiff of air. The collapse
is fundamentally due to the unstable position; the instantaneous
cause of the collapse is secondary."

When things are unstable, it isn't the last grain of sand that
causes the pile to collapse or the slight breeze that causes the
ruler on your fingertip to fall. Those are the "proximate"
causes. They're the closest reasons at hand for the
collapse. The real reason, though, is the "remote" cause, the
farthest reason. The farthest reason is the underlying
instability of the system itself.

A fundamentally unstable system is exactly what we saw in the
recent credit crisis. Consumers all through the world's largest
economies borrowed money for all sorts of things, because times
were good. Home prices would always go up and the stock market
was back to its old trick of making 15% a year. And borrowing
money was relatively cheap. You could get 2% short-term loans on
homes, which seemingly rose in value 15% a year, so why not buy
now and sell a few years down the road?

Greed took over. Those risky loans were sold to investors by the
tens and hundreds of billions of dollars, all over the world. And
as with all debt sandpiles, the fault lines started to appear.
Maybe it was that one loan in Las Vegas that was the
critical piece of sand; we don't know, but the avalanche was
triggered.

You may not remember this, but I was writing about the problems
with subprime debt way back in 2005 and 2006. But as the problem
actually emerged, respected people like Ben Bernanke (the
chairman of the Fed) said that the problem was not all that big
and that the fallout would be "contained." (I bet he wishes he
could have that statement back!)

But it wasn't contained. It caused banks to realize that what
they thought was AAA credit was actually a total loss. And as
banks looked at what was on their books, they wondered about
their fellow banks. How bad were they? Who knew? Since no one
did, they stopped lending to each other. Credit simply froze.
They stopped taking each other's letters of credit, and that hurt
world trade. Because banks were losing money, they stopped
lending to smaller businesses. Commercial paper dried up. All
those "safe" off-balance-sheet funds that banks created were now
folding (what my friend Paul McCulley first labeled as the Shadow
Banking System). Everyone sold what they could, not what they
wanted to, to cover their debts. It was a true panic. Businesses
started laying off people, who in turn stopped spending as much.

As I read through this again, I think I have an insight. It is
one of the reasons we get "fat tails." In theory, returns on
investment should look like a smooth bell curve, with the ends
tapering off into nothing. According to the theoretical
distribution, events that deviate from the mean by five or more
standard deviations ("5-sigma events") are extremely rare, with
10 or more sigma being practically impossible – at least in
theory. However, under certain circumstances, such events are
more common than expected; 15-sigma or even rarer events have
happened in the world of investments. Examples of such unlikely
events include Long Term Capital in the late '90s and any of a
dozen bubbles in history. Because the real-world commonality of
high-sigma events is much greater than in theory, the
distribution is "fatter" at the extremes ("tails") than a truly
normal one.

Thus, the build-up of critical states, those fingers of
instability, is perpetuated even as, and precisely because, we
hedge risks. We try to "stabilize" the risks we see, shoring them
up with derivatives, emergency plans, insurance, and all manner
of risk-control procedures. And by doing so, the economic system
can absorb body blows that would have been severe only a few
decades ago. We distribute the risks and the effects of the risk
throughout the system.

Yet as we reduce the known risks, we sow the seeds for the next
10-sigma event. It is the improbable risks that we do not yet see
that will create the next real crisis. It is not that the fingers
of instability have been removed from the equation, it is that
they are in different places and are not yet visible.

A second related concept is from game theory. The Nash
equilibrium (named after John Nash, he of The
Beautiful Mind) is a kind of optimal strategy for games
involving two or more players, whereby the players reach an
outcome to mutual advantage. If there is a set of strategies for
a game with the property that no player can benefit by changing
his strategy while (if) the other players keep their strategies
unchanged, then that set of strategies and the corresponding
payoffs constitute a Nash equilibrium.

A Stable
Disequilibrium

So we end up in a critical state of what Paul McCulley calls a
"stable disequilibrium." We have "players" of this game
from all over the world tied inextricably together in a vast
dance through investment, debt, derivatives, trade,
globalization, international business, and finance. Each player
works hard to maximize their own personal outcome and to reduce
their exposure to "fingers of instability."

But the longer we go on, asserts Minsky, the more likely and
violent an "avalanche" is. The more the fingers of instability
can build. The more that state of stable disequilibrium can go
critical on us.

Go back to 1997. Thailand began to experience trouble. The debt
explosion in Asia began to unravel. Russia was defaulting on its
bonds. (Astounding. Was it less than ten years ago? Now Russian
is awash in capital. Who could anticipate such a dramatic turn of
events?) Things on the periphery, small fingers of instability,
began to impinge on fault lines in the major world economies.
Something that had not been seen before happened: the
historically sound and logical relationship between 29- and
30-year bonds broke down. Then country after country suddenly and
inexplicably saw that relationship in their bonds begin to
correlate, an unheard-of event. A diversified pool of debt was
suddenly no longer diversified.

The fingers of instability reached into Long Term Capital
Management and nearly brought the financial world to its knees.

If it were not for the fact that we are coming to the closing
innings of the Debt Supercycle, we would already be in a robust
recovery. But we are not. And sadly, we have a long way to go
with this deleveraging process. It will take years.

You can't borrow your way out of a debt crisis, whether you are a
family or a nation. And, as too many families are finding out
today, if you lose your job you can lose your home. People who
were once very creditworthy are now filing for bankruptcy and
walking away from homes. All those subprime loans going bad put
huges numbers of homes back onto the market, which caused prices
to fall on all homes, which caused an entire home-construction
industry to collapse, which hurt all sorts of ancillary
businesses, which caused more people to lose their jobs and give
up their homes, and on and on. The connections in the housing
part of the sandpile were long and deep.

It's all connected. We built a very unstable sand pile and it
came crashing down, and now we have to dig out from the problem.
And the problem was too much debt. It will take years, as banks
write off home loans and commercial real estate and more, and we
get down to a more reasonable level of debt as a country and as a
world.

And, bringing this tale of instability up to date, we find that
Ben Bernanke and his central bank colleagues worldwide have taken
much of the burden of sovereign debt upon their mighty shoulders.
But as they push their Sisyphean, quantitative easing boulders up
the ever-steepening sandpile of the global economy, which side of
the pile will collapse first? Will it be the European side,
already dangerously unstable? Or the Japanese side, where the QE
boulder is about to grow into a real whopper? Or could it happen
over on the China slope, which is riddled with fiscal and
financial crevasses?

And lest we be complacent here in the US, we only need Niall
Ferguson to remind us, as he did here at the conference this
morning, that the US may be in the grip of a profound structural
malaise that neither easing nor austerity can relieve. I'll have
much more to say about Niall's presentation and those of our
other speakers in coming weeks. We were treated to some
world-class thinking and synthesizing of views here today, with
much more to come tomorrow! And I'll keep on asking everyone who
comes to the stage, "But what about Japan?"

Our 10th Annual Strategic Investment Conference
is definitely shaping up as our best ever. And with intellects
like Niall Ferguson, Lacy Hunt, and Nouriel Roubini, as well as
premier investment managers that include the entire partner team
from GaveKal (Louis and Charles Gave and Anatole Kaletsky),
Jeffrey Gundlach, Kyle
Bass, and Mohamed El-Erian, how could it not be the best? In
his afternoon presentation, Mohamed did a beautiful job of tying
together the themes we focused on today – and he was introduced
by his best friend (and early-morning walking and debating
partner), the irrepressible and incorrigible Paul McCulley, who
was also our keynote speaker last night.

The conference is turning out to be everything that my co-host,
Altegris, and I hoped and expected it would be. We are already
working hard to get the conference videos ready, in order to send
them to the attendees and all Mauldin Circle members over the
coming weeks. In the meantime, here is a great montage from
last year's conference for you to enjoy. If you are not yet a
Mauldin Circle member, let
this clip remind you of the unique benefits offered to those
who join my inner circle.

Click
here to initiate your membership in my exclusive
Mauldin Circle Program for accredited investors and investment
professionals. My partner Altegris and I have worked hard to
enhance the program, which now includes access to webinars,
conferences, special events, videos, accredited newsletters,
and presentations featuring alternative-investment managers and
other thought leaders and influencers.

The good news is that this program is completely free. The only
restriction is that, because of securities regulations, you
have to register and be vetted by one of my trusted partners,
which in the United States is Altegris, before you can be added
to the subscriber roster. This will be a quite painless process
(I promise). I do not like limiting the letter to
accredited investors, but those are the rules under which I
work. This is not of my choosing, and I have worked in front of
and behind the scenes to try to change what I think is a very
unfair rule. (See important risk disclosures below. In this
regard, I am president and a registered representative of
Millennium Wave Securities, LLC, member FINRA.) Once you
register, an Altegris representative will call you and
establish access to the videos, presentations, and summaries
from the speakers featured at our 2013 Strategic Investment
Conference, as soon as they are ready.

Tulsa, Brussels, NYC,
and Monaco

I am off to Tulsa in two weeks to "give away" my daughter
Abigail Joy as she gets married on a Sunday. "Dad, do you have
a tux?" came the call, as I think she might have noticed I am
not wearing ties all that much these days. Actually, I had kind
of planned to wear a tie at least one day here at the
conference, but all my ties are still in storage, as are my
shoes – I am down to one pair.

I was sitting outside during a break with Niall Ferguson and
his wife, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, going over what she and I would
cover when I did my Charlie
Rose imitation and interviewed her at lunchtime. Mohamed
came by and wished me well at the wedding. I paused for a
second to think about which wedding he meant, and Niall gave me
a hard time about not immediately getting the focus of his
congratulations. "Aren't you involved?" he queried, and threw
in a few other friendly jibes. I had to note my distraction
over interviewing his wife in public (if you do not know the
compelling story of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Google
her and then read her books, starting with her first one,
Infidel. She is a powerful advocate for Muslim women,
at great risk to her own life). While she is utterly charming
and so gracious, she is also "formidable" (best said with a
French accent), and I was intently focused on what we were
going to discuss.

But trying to salvage my damaged reputation as a father, I
immediately noted that Niall had clearly not gone through this
process (though he and Ayaan do have a toddler at home). "The
role of Dad," I said, "is to write a lot of checks and smile
and show up at the wedding, walk down the aisle, smile, and
hand off your precious jewel to some young kid – though you do
get to dance with your daughter at the reception.” (And you
have to resist the impulse to grab her by the hand and run off,
as you remember her bouncing on your knee, running to the door
to greet you, and sharing a thousand other treasured
father-daughter moments.) Ayaan smiled and agreed. Niall just
put on that fierce Scottish grin of his as he thought about his
own kids and the costs of future weddings. (And congratulations
to Ayaan, as she is now a US citizen. This country needs more
people of her caliber to remind us of the "why" of who we are.)

The coming week starts another series of road trips – a day in
Atlanta to attend the Galectin Therapeutics board meeting,
followed by Nashville for Altegris, the weekend to Brussels and
later the next week to Geneva, back to Dallas for a week, and
then to Washington, DC, and New York.

It is not just time to hit the send button; as I close this, I
also still need to finalize the PowerPoint of my brand-new
presentation for tomorrow and host a reception on the lawn …
and then do a series of meetings and video shots with guests
(which will hopefully show up in this space one day soon)!